|
Vols, Gators Even Compete Over Gatorade Ties |
|
Wednesday, 12 September 2007 |
The world knows Gatorade as a wildly successful sports drink. Fans of the University of Florida, where the thirst-quencher was developed in the mid-1960s, think it's a reason the Gators win national titles -- at least according to the current television commercial voiced by Keith Jackson.
But in Knoxville, Tenn., there's a man who understands that without the help of a family and a company with close ties to one of the Gators' fiercest rivals, Gatorade might never have gotten beyond the beaker.
"It was brought to a number of companies before it was brought to us," recalls William Stokely III, a Tennessee grad who had worked for his father at Stokely Van Camp Co. "As I understand it, we said it probably has some potential, and we'll give it a try."
As Gatorade grew into the entity that owns more than 80% of a $6billion sports drink market, the on-field rivalry between Florida and Tennessee also exploded into one of the country's biggest. The No.3 Gators host the No.24 Vols on Saturday.
Stokely III is one of four generations of William Stokelys who attended Tennessee. He lives in Knoxville and runs a real estate investment company. He has Vols season tickets and is a former UT trustee. Stokely Center on campus was named for his father and for years housed the men's and women's basketball games as well as athletics department offices.
The Stokely Co. was started by Stokely III's great-grandmother and four sons, including the first William, as a vegetable-canning enterprise in Newport, Tenn., just east of Knoxville. Stokely II eventually took over the business and acquired the Van Camp canning company. The whole enterprise was headquartered in Indianapolis as Stokely Van Camp.
In 1965, Florida researchers, led by Robert Cade, after studying sweat to see what nutrients the body lost during athletic activity, created a drink to replace them. The researchers could not find anyone to market it, including their own school, until Stokely Van Camp took it on in 1967.
It was not an easy sell. As Stokely III recalls, the new drink "tasted awful." Also, the prevailing athletic philosophy was to avoid fluids during practices "because they thought you would get cramps."
Stokely III said the company basically took over Gatorade, giving the researchers royalties. "We took their product and flavored it and changed it," he said. "We marketed it to college teams and the NFL, and then the retail store (business) came down the road."
When Quaker Oats took over Stokely Van Camp in the early 1980s, the person overseeing Gatorade also had a Tennessee connection. Bill Schmidt, javelin bronze medalist in the 1972 Olympics, earned a graduate degree from UT.
Tennessee, oddly enough, has been "a longtime user and a great partner," said Schmidt, former Gatorade vice president for sports marketing. UT legend Peyton Manning's first major promotional deal was with Gatorade. But Schmidt, now a marketing consultant, knows what was really important: "My worst fear as I was doing these college deals was we could never lose to the University of Florida."
Cade, the lead Florida researcher, could not be reached for this story.
As for Stokely, despite the success Gatorade brought his company, he has no soft spot for the Gators. "I bleed Tennessee orange," he says. "I'm not a Florida fan."
Copyright 2007 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. |
